How can screenwriters create movie villains that are more compelling and engaging? Enter thought-provoking villain monologues. Merriam-Webster defines thought-provoking as causing people to think seriously about something. To think seriously about something, we need to come at the subject or situation at hand from every possible angle. And to accomplish that, we need to learn the different perspectives that can be attributed to whatever the subject may be.
In movies and television, we generally have the protagonist's perspective and the antagonist's perspective. And villains are on the extreme end of the antagonist spectrum. They usually graduate from antagonist to villain by having evil intentions. Enter Now Final Deadline in 26 days. He's just doing his job trying to track down a convicted murderer.
But let's be honest β villains are more fun to write. Their evil intentions raise the stakes. And raising the stakes should be every screenwriter's goal on every single page of the script.
However, villains often become one-note ponies in that respect. They have evil intentions and want to harm the hero at all costs. It ends up being a very black-and-white situation.
But what if you could blur those lines a bit β or at the very least, what if you could make the reader and the audience see the villain's point of view? And in the more disturbing cases see below with the truly evil Colonel Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds , what if you could understand the evil just a bit more when you learn the unreasonable reasoning behind their horrific intentions and actions? That is the key to writing better villains. And to do that, you may need that thought-provoking villain monologue.
